Sunday, January 17, 2010

39. “The Bleeding Heart Show” by The New Pornographers (2005)


As the decade wore on, the “super group” tag attached to the New Pornographers began to seem really befitting. AC Newman, the New Porn’s main songwriter has essentially established himself as the master crafter of the power pop song. Neko Case is Neko Case and it seems like the New Porn’s pop sound took her solo career out of its countrified shell and got her and her band to expand their palate for the better. Dan Bejar of Destroyer contributed a handful of quirky gypsy folk pop songs to each New Porns record, all of them typically excellent. The end result is Newman and Bejar basically getting a kick-ass backing band, with Neko chipping in on lead vocals and/or harmonies. If that sounds good on paper, it’s even better on the records. Nowhere is this better exemplified than with “The Bleeding Heart Show”, which mystifies me as far as the lyrics go (“In business of your lives, the perception, it is wrong, mile after mile. The phantom taste drinking wine from your heels.”), but never ceases to rock it out with the anthemic “hey la’s” in the coda. This is a truly fantastic pop song that is incredibly catchy and never not enjoyable to listen to. Check it out.

As an aside, when trying to find you tube links to these songs, I sometimes come across really absurd videos. And sometimes I come across decent homemade ones, like this one.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yawn.